The Pope is anxious to have at least well-intentioned men in places of power.  Men of much ability, it would seem, are not to be had.  His last prime minister was a man said to have energy, good dispositions, but no thinking power.  The Cardinal Bofondi, whom he has taken now, is said to be a man of scarce any ability; there being few among the new Councillors the public can name as fitted for important trust.  In consolation, we must remember that the Chancellor Oxenstiern found nothing more worthy of remark to show his son, than by how little wisdom the world could be governed.  We must hope these men of straw will serve as thatch to keep out the rain, and not be exposed to the assaults of a devouring flame.

Yet that hour may not be distant.  The disturbances of the 1st of January here were answered by similar excitements in Leghorn and Genoa, produced by the same hidden and malignant foe.  At the same time, the Austrian government in Milan organized an attempt to rouse the people to revolt, with a view to arrests, and other measures calculated to stifle the spirit of independence they know to be latent there.  In this iniquitous attempt they murdered eighty persons; yet the citizens, on their guard, refused them the desired means of ruin, and they were forced to retractions as impudently vile as their attempts had been.  The Viceroy proclaimed that “he hoped the people would confide in him as he did in them”; and no doubt they will.  At Leghorn and Genoa, the wiles of the foe were baffled by the wisdom of the popular leaders, as I trust they always will be; but it is needful daily to expect these nets laid in the path of the unwary.

Sicily is in full insurrection; and it is reported Naples, but this is not sure.  There was a report, day before yesterday, that the poor, stupid king was already here, and had taken cheap chambers at the Hotel d’Allemagne, as, indeed, it is said he has always a turn for economy, when he cannot live at the expense of his suffering people.  Day before yesterday, every carriage that the people saw with a stupid-looking man in it they did not know, they looked to see if it was not the royal runaway.  But it was their wish was father to that thought, and it has not as yet taken body as fact.  In like manner they report this week the death of Prince Metternich; but I believe it is not sure he is dead yet, only dying.  With him passes one great embodiment of ill to Europe.  As for Louis Philippe, he seems reserved to give the world daily more signal proofs of his base apostasy to the cause that placed him on the throne, and that heartless selfishness, of which his face alone bears witness to any one that has a mind to read it.  How the French nation could look upon that face, while yet flushed with the hopes of the Three Days, and put him on the throne as representative of those hopes, I cannot conceive.  There is a story current in Italy, that he is really the child of a man first a barber, afterwards a police-officer, and was substituted at nurse for the true heir of Orleans; and the vulgarity of form in his body of limbs, power of endurance, greed of gain, and hard, cunning intellect, so unlike all traits of the weak, but more “genteel” Bourbon race, might well lend plausibility to such a fable.